Updated Settings Panel in Events 2.0.5

Among the changes and tweaks included in The Events Calendar/Events Calendar PRO 2.0.5, few were as noticeable right off the bat to all users as the changes to the Settings page. We cleaned it up, broke things out into a tabbed navigation and cleaned up the overall experience in a way that we hope you like.

Though we’d previously covered the Settings panel in some introductory documentation published when 2.0 launched, these new tweaks rendered that post obsolete…so here we’ve got round two. It’s worth noting that all of the features you’ve come to know & love from past builds are still here….but they may have been moved around or changed a bit, so pay attention. There are also some new features that may be of value to your particular install.

Cool, right? To summarize, in order of tabs as they were reviewed…

General

Default View For Events: Lets you configure whether your events appear on the frontend in grid or list view. Both views remain accessible to users viewing your calendar and they can toggle back and forth between them using easily labeled buttons.

Events URL slug/Single Event URL slug: These control where on your site the event calendar lives. The first is the broader calendar; if it shows /events (which is what it defaults to with pretty permalinks enabled), this means that visiting /events on the frontend of your site will bring up the calendar. Change this to whatever you desire but note that it cannot conflict with the Single Event URL slug. Examples of the slug as it’ll appear with relation to your site’s full URL is presented for each.

Number of Events To Show Per Page in the Loop: In previous versions, this was controlled by whatever you had set for overall WordPress install (under Settings -> Reading). This meant that if you had 7 blog posts set to appear in the homepage blog loop, only 7 events would appear in every Events loop too. The new setting breaks those apart and allows them each to be set independently. If you still want 7 blog posts in your main loop, fine; but now you can show as many or few events elsewhere as you see fit.

Show Comments: A simple checkbox for enabling and disabling comments on your events. If enabled, comments will behave the same as any other WordPress comment, and their behaviors dictated by what you’ve set under Settings –> Discussion on your site’s backend.

Multiday Event Cutoff: Sometimes you have an event that, while technically spanning over the course of two days, isn’t quite appropriate to have displayed that way. A good example is a party: while you may have rented the bar out from 9 p.m. Friday until 4 a.m. Saturday, it wouldn’t make sense to have that event displayed as a Friday-Saturday party. (What if people showed up the second night hoping for a rager?!). By using this setting, the final day for any event that ends on or before the time specified in the dropdown will not appear in grid view.

Enable Google Maps: Check this box if you want to enable the ability to display an embedded Google Map within your event listings. The location show on the map can be controlled on a post-by-post by basis, and will display the venue location using the Google Maps API. You have the option to set the embed height & width, as well as — starting in 2.0.5 — the zoom level of embedded maps (anywhere from 0, out in space; to 21, zoomed way in close). The zoom level defaults t0 1o, about halfway between the extremes of 0 and 21.

Debug: When this box is checked, debug information will be logged to your server PHP error log.

Template

Previously on the main settings page, the Template options have just been segmented out into their own tab. It provides a dropdown from which you can adjust the calendar’s appearance on the frontend. The plugin comes with template options of it’s own, and most plugins bring their own as well. Select a template from the dropdown, save and review the frontend of your site to see which works best for your layout.

With the Add HTML Before/After fields that appear below the dropdown, any information — text or HTML — that you’d like to display above or below the calendar can generally be added right here. Make sure to check your work on the frontend after saving, since there is a chance to make your calendar ugly if using this without being careful.

Defaults

After the box to enable these has been checked, customized defaults can save time on the event creation side by keeping you from having to manually re-enter venue/organizer details. Configure as many or as few details as you wish and upon saving, any new event created will have those fields pre-populated until you say otherwise. This was another feature that existed prior to 2.0.5 but has now been segmented out into its own tab.

Additional Fields

We’ve covered this elsewhere, so I won’t go into too much depth about it here. But if you need to add additional data about your events (caterer, for example) do so here…anyone creating new events will be able to utilize your additions. On the frontend this data appears right up alongside the start/end date, venue, etc. You can add as many as you see fit by hitting the “Add Another” option, and can pick your preference of text/dropdown/radio/checkboxes.

Licenses

Starting with 2.0.5, any events-related add-on you buy from Modern Tribe that requires a license will require you visit this tab. Licenses for all add-ons are placed here! The more you have installed, the more fields will appear. You can add as many or as few as you want at a given time; remember that since none of our plugins require the license to work, you’re merely adding them to access support & future updates. If you’re running a free plugin or one that doesn’t require a license you can obviously ignore this field.

Help

We spent a lot of time devising the Help tab so it’d be as valuable as possible to the community. Got an integration question or bug? Go here first. Aside from giving you an overview of our philosophy and how we treat support issues, it’ll direct you to valuable places like our help videos / FAQs / documentation / etc. We built this plugin to serve you and tried to cram as much information that can help you succeed in here as possible (without making it feel like an inundation…we hope).

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That pretty much sums it up. Anything unclear? Still got questions? Let us know in the comments below. Thanks — as always — for listening.